Posted 3 years ago on June 6, 2013, 6:44 p.m. EST by therising
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U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program.

Excerpt:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who know about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as * the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief * , which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

13 Comments

The N.S.A. had been doing electronic surveillance without warrants for many decades. Why is everyone sounding so surprised about its going after the treasure troves of information in servers, especially after the knee-jerk reactions from the perennial undeclared "war on terror"? It seemed like a job stimulus program to me.

If it is any consolation at all, with the amount of data involved people can rest assured that computers are doing the filtering and knowing how great 'lazy' programmers can be, we can very well believe that there is nearly no partiality due to very few special cases (even for the demigods - the late Senator Kennedy was on the no-fly list, by Jove!) programmed.

This house of cards is about to come down. You can feel it. Its foundation is hollowed out like the wooden beams in a basement eaten by termites. Oh, the house still stands there looking mighty solid, but in the blink of an eye it can all fall down. And, it happens. Throughout history. Here we go again...